We hear a lot about crowdsourcing these days — the seemingly democratic, web friendly enterprise that brings small contributors together with small entrepreneurs to promote new businesses or to help people who need surgeries raise the funds — a pitiful way to provide healthcare in one of the world’s richest nations, by the way. The popular notion of crowdsourcing, as laid out by Jacob Silverman in The Baffler is that it’s flexible, efficient, empowering, by-passes bureaucracy and is the technological equivalent of a bake sale. (“The Crowdsourcing Scam,” by Jacob Silverman, The Baffler, Volume #26, pg. 111). The truth, according to Silverman, is something quite different. It’s a union busting tactic. It lowers wages, enriches corporations, is isolating and, equally important, it creates an illusion “that there is a crowd at all.” (Ibid. pg. 107)

Crowdsourcing when applied to jobs usually means jobs done at home by contract workers. The tasks are broken into small parts, like assembly line tasks, and the pieces are farmed out to people in need of work who will do repetitive jobs for low wages. These contract workers have no union, no communion with fellow employees and no way to negotiate the terms of their employment. Worse, these people are overseen by computers that determine whether or not a worker is productive and if not, the worker is “deactivated.” Case in point is Uber, the taxi service comprised of independent drivers. If these workers receive too many customer complaints or aren’t available a sufficient amount of the time, they are disconnected from the system without due process by a computer. As Silverman puts it, how does a person argue with a structure that treats people like spare parts of a machine? (Ibid pg. 109.)

Crowdsourcing defenders will point to all the good causes the system serves. But, according to Silverman, more than good deeds are at work. For example, the CAPTCHA a user punches in to enter a site does more than prove the potential donor is human. Google, for example, catches the typed letters as part of their massive book scanning project, turning donors into unwitting scribes. Putting book classics on the internet may seem harmless, but consider the ultimate purpose. According to Silverman, CAPTCHA provides “scaffolding on which Google can hang more ads (having begun the project without bothering to consult any of the authors or publishers who owned the original work.)” (Ibid 1113). Language schools use student labor for a similar purpose. The translations they require as assignments are pieces of larger documents which the school compiles and then sells for commercial purposes..(Ibid 112) As Silverman points out, this kind of crowdsourcing is “a good way to extract labor from masses of people at very low cost.” (Ibid pg. 110)

Unfortunately, crowdsourcing is sold as a method of empowering people, allowing them to take control of their lives and by-pass government bureaucracy. In reality, corporations have found a way to decimate labor organizations and escape government regulations under the guise of assisting good causes. Perhaps it’s time to give crowdsourcing closer scrutiny. (For a related topic see Blog Monday Feb 2, 2015)

Some crowd sourcing is valid. For instance, I happily donated a small sum to help support an archaeological dig at a site in imminent danger of being lost to oceanic storms. And I volunteer as a transcriber for non-profit museum and libraries. But you are right that there are issues. I would not call it the dark side of crowd sourcing, however. It is a new version of the old story of exploitation of a good idea in the interests of greed. I've seen some projects on a well-known fund-raising site that were simply commercial ventures looking for easy money, and getting it, to the detriment of small entrepreneurs with good ideas. I've never seen a piece work labor scam such as you describe as part of crowd sourcing. Or rather, those are nothing new; it's just a new label for them, borrowed from the legitimate application of the tool. What is new, however, are for profit companies using volunteers to do what seems like a public good, then charging the public a sizable "membership fee" in order to access the results. This is exactly what Ancestry.com has done in the indexing of the US censuses. They are certainly entitled to recoup their costs in administering the project, but I question the propriety of using free labor for what is clearly a money making project. Other organizations are doing a great job of getting things done on a shoestring. I am not a fan of Google by any means, and to the degree that they digitize printed works without permission, I think they are wrong (and I think are coming to recognize it). But before you judge them too harshly for the captcha thing, think for a moment what that project can accomplish. There are thousands upon thousands of documents and publications out there, nearly all in the public domain, that are being lost due to damage, inattention, deliberate destruction, or simply time. These materials are the history of our civilization and it is important that they not be lost. Some can be digitized directly. But some need transcribing simply to read (especially hand-written). All need indexing to make them searchable and therefore meaningful. There are never going to be enough transcribers to make that happen. Those captchas you mention are helping to develop software that can read obscure fonts and styles and translate them it into transcripts that can be indexed automatically.
It is not a black and white issue. I think it is important to stand up to the abuses, both actual and potential, but I think it is also important to acknowledge the long-term benefits of projects like these. Sometimes what appears to be a negative is not. It may be a positive whose benefits are obscured, sometimes by shortsightedness, sometimes by overreaching, and sometimes by simple lack of understanding.

Some interesting comments here. Agree, nothing is ever block or white. But it is important to know all the issues regarding crowdsourcing to make informed decisions about when and what to support. As for captcha being used for a good cause, maybe. But all that free labor, given without consent, strikes me as deceptive, and, like Silverman, I question whether or not that "good cause" justifies unfair labor practices. It's an important question in an age of burgeoning technology.

Caroline published a serialized novelette, Marie Eau-Claire, on the website, The Colored Lens. She also published the story Gustav Pavel, a parable about ordinary lives, choice and alternate potential, on the website Fixional.co.